At the same time, I remember something in my mind saying, ‘And that doesn’t matter.’”
How Facebook, fake news and friends are warping your memory. Clockwise from top left: G.

The ideological psychopaths behind Trump, Putin and Brexit – Infinite Coincidence. I’ve seen several headlines comparing Steve Bannon, Trump’s Chief Strategist, to the Mad Monk Rasputin, given the coincidence of their seemingly hypnotic influence over the country’s most powerful man and their apparent commitment to arcane forms of Evil.

Rasputin also has a counterpart in contemporary Russian politics, in the form of Vladislav Surkov, ‘Putin’s grey cardinal’, a figure who, according to the Atlantic, “has directed Russian society like one great reality show”, often using bizarre means of discrediting anyone who stands up to the Government. A meeting between Bannon and Surkov would put Malcolm Tucker and Jamie from ‘The Thick of It’ in the shade. Although Tony Blair’s Press Secretary Alistair Campbell was the model for Tucker, his bullying and lying could hardly be called psychopathic, and he seems to have been driven by loyalty and career progression rather than destructive zeal even as his dishonesty and cynicism destroyed the Middle East.
Orbán is a tool in Putin's information war against the West. Czech analysts found after investigating 22,000 Russian-language online sources that Moscow’s propaganda started two years before the military intervention in the case of Ukraine and four weeks in advance concerning Syria.

First came the journalists, then tanks and bombs. From the 2010s the Russian army and its military intelligence service started dominating the control of Russian propaganda; thus, whatever is published in the 90% state-dependent Russian media is part of the Russian Federation’s military strategy. Semantic Visions, a Czech company also examined the role played by European leaders, including Viktor Orbán, and the results are worrying. The Kremlin-controlled Russian media uses politicians voicing an anti-EU and anti-West rhetoric to legitimise the Putin's regime.

Donald Trump is the sole reliable source of truth, says chair of House Science Committee. The Empathy Trap by Peter Singer. PRINCETON – Soon after Barack Obama was elected President of the United States, he told a young girl: “We don’t have enough empathy in our world today, and it is up to your generation to change that.”

Obama expressed a widespread view, so the title of a new book, Against Empathy, by Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom, comes as a shock. How can anyone be against something that enables us to put ourselves in others’ shoes and feel what they feel? To answer that question, we might ask another: For whom should we have empathy?
Dove Just Hilariously Trolled Trump's "Alternative Facts" With New Ad Campaign. 19 Shares Share Tweet Email Unilever’s brand Dove, producer of soaps and other personal care products, has just released an ad campaign in the UK mercilessly mocking Donald Trump’s administration.

Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway recently claimed that the Administration was offering “alternative facts” instead of lies when she was accused of spreading obvious falsehoods.
Poe’s law explains why 2016 was so terrible.
Screenshot via CNN We will all remember 2016’s political theater for many reasons: for its exhausting, divisive election, for its memes both dank and dark, for the fact that the country’s first female presidential candidate won the popular vote by a margin of 2.8 million and still lost the election to an actual reality show villain.

But 2016 was also marked—besieged, even—by Poe’s law, a decade-old internet adage articulated by Nathan Poe, a commentator on a creationism discussion thread.
Oxfam, la disuguaglianza è negli occhi di chi guarda. How to Convince Someone When Facts Fail. Have you ever noticed that when you present people with facts that are contrary to their deepest held beliefs they always change their minds?

Me neither. In fact, people seem to double down on their beliefs in the teeth of overwhelming evidence against them. The reason is related to the worldview perceived to be under threat by the conflicting data. Creationists, for example, dispute the evidence for evolution in fossils and DNA because they are concerned about secular forces encroaching on religious faith. Anti-vaxxers distrust big pharma and think that money corrupts medicine, which leads them to believe that vaccines cause autism despite the inconvenient truth that the one and only study claiming such a link was retracted and its lead author accused of fraud.

Skeptical Questions Everyone Should Ask. Because I am an activist skeptic I am often asked specific questions about how to be a better skeptic.

This is obviously a complex question, and I view skepticism (like all knowledge) as a journey not a destination. I am still trying to work out how to be a better skeptic. One recent question, however, took a great approach to the issue of practical skepticism – what questions should a skeptic ask themselves when confronted with a news item? Here is my process:
Come l'estrema destra sta conquistando Google - Motherboard. Valutare l'informazione in rete tra bufale, bolle e complottismo. Démasquer les intox sur Internet. How to Spot and Debunk Fake News. 9 Ways to Spot Bogus Data. Six Easy Ways To Tell If That Viral Story Is A Hoax.

“And so it begins … ISIS flag among refugees in Germany fighting the police,” blared the headline on the Conservative Post; “with this new leaked picture, everything seems confirmed”.

The image in question purported to show a group of Syrian refugees holding ISIS flags and attacking German police officers. For those resistant to accepting refugees into Europe, this story was a godsend. The photo quickly spread across social media, propelled by far-right groups such as the English Defence League and Pegida UK.

Hoaxkiller. FotoForensics. Field Guide to Fake News Sites and Hoax Purveyors. The sharp increase in popularity of social media networks (primarily Facebook) has created a predatory secondary market among online publishers seeking to profitably exploit the large reach of those networks and their huge customer bases by spreading fake news and outlandish rumors. Competition for social media’s large supply of willing eyeballs is fierce, and a number of frequent offenders regularly fabricate salacious and attention-grabbing tales simply to drive traffic (and revenue) to their sites.

Facebook has worked at limiting the reach of hoax-purveying sites in their customers’ news feeds, inhibiting (but not eradicating) the spread of fake news stories. Hoaxes and fake news are often little more than annoyances to unsuspecting readers; but sometimes circulating stories negatively affect businesses or localities by spreading false, disruptive claims that are widely believed.
B.S. Detector - Browser extension to identify fake news sites. Fake news : peut-on répondre à la désinformation. 6 Quick Ways to Spot Fake News. The spectrum of less-than-credible links posted to social media sites is vast. In addition to deliberately written fake news stories (often somewhat inaccurately tagged as “satire”), the online world abounds with articles that are based on exaggerated, misconstrued, manipulated, misrepresented, or outright deceptive premises.

It’s fair to say that the majority of users on social media sites wish to share interesting, funny, compelling, unique, or otherwise discussion-worthy material without having to run full-scale fact checks on everything. It’s also reasonable to observe that every so often, not-so-trustworthy information will sneak into posts despite the best efforts and intentions of social media users. However, some common elements help identify shaky stories and poorly-sourced claims.

Identify a Lie with 6 Simple Questions. Post written by: Marc Chernoff Email We all fall victim to at least a few lies during the course of our lifetime. Some lies may be extremely troublesome to our personal wellbeing, while other “white lies” may be far more innocuous.

There’s a new tool to visualize how fake news is spread on Twitter — Quartz. It is nighttime and my young son is asleep; I am awake and trying to help him. If he were a little older I might be gluing something onto a science project or baking cupcakes for a school event. Instead, I am drawing my finger over lines of imaginary fruit on an iPad, trying to rack up points so he can better enjoy a game called Fruit Pop, a matching game similar to the wildly popular Candy Crush. Specifically, I am trying to increase the stack of coins in his account so that he can buy boosts that alter the game in some way (such as giving the player more than the normally allotted sixty seconds per turn).

After a while, it becomes evident that the easiest way to obtain coins is simply to buy them with real cash—such as 50,000 coins for $1.99 (the most common in-app purchase in Fruit Pop).
Now you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselves. How Photos Fuel the Spread of Fake News. The True Story Behind The Biggest Fake News Hit Of The Election - BuzzFeed News. How Teens In The Balkans Are Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News - BuzzFeed News. Bernie Sanders Could Replace President Trump With Little Known Loophole.

This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook - BuzzFeed News. Stop worrying about fake news. What comes next will be much worse. Post verità: vivere, capire, scegliere, votare tra bufale e camere dell'eco. How to verify photos and videos on social media networks. Study: most students can't spot fake news. ‘Who shared it?’ How Americans decide what news to trust on social media. 12 Reasons Why You Should Research a Facebook Rumour Before Passing It On. Evaluer la crédibilité d'une ressource sur le web.

Italia contemporanea. Shake Edizioni. The 6 Grand Illusions That Keep Us Enslaved - War Is Crime. Structured Water Pseudoscience and Quackery. Riflessioni in libertà: Il Popolo Unico, o il tunnel di Wile E. Coyote. The cult of ignorance in the United States: Anti-intellectualism and the "dumbing down" of America. Germans Thought They Were Free and So do You. A chi appartiene la nostra attenzione?